In recent years, services provided via the Internet have been increasingly prevalent. As servers manage text information, images, videos, and the like created by users as well as news, weather forecast, movie information, and other contents created by companies, services for supplying these contents any time via the Internet have also been rapidly increased.
One of the services is photograph sharing service. A user can upload photographs taken by the user himself/herself to a server, and later view the photographed images any time by accessing the server from a personal computer or the like via the Internet.
In order to upload photographed images to a server, products have recently been developed to facilitate the uploading procedure. Digital cameras, memory cards, and the like have wireless LAN function to automatically upload photographed images directly to a server by simple procedures.
On the other hand, in order to download and display images uploaded to a server, the following television sets (hereinafter, TVs) are currently on the market. The TVs are connectable to the Internet. A user uses such a TV to access a server and logins with, for example, a user ID and a password, thereby obtaining images from the server.
However, the downloading procedures still use conventional interface techniques of personal computers. Therefore, the operability is not improved. The TVs with Internet function, which are recently on the market, require pressing buttons of a remote controller some dozens times to download data such as photographs. A user needs to read a manual to follow the complicated procedures. This would not be a high obstacle for young generations and those having high computer skills. However, such procedures requiring relatively high skills are complicated and bothersome for middle-aged and elderly people and general women. Users not familiar with computer operations find difficult to enjoy the services. The problem in operability has been examined to be improved, but the improved techniques are not different from the conventional computer operation methods. The operability is not significantly improved.
Patent Reference 1 discloses the following technique. A display device connected to a server has a Radio Frequency IDentification (RF-ID) reader. An object (commodity, merchandise, or the like) is provided with a RF-ID tag including a non-rewritable memory in which object Unique IDentification (UID) is stored. A server has a database in which the object ID (UID) is associated with an image such as a user's face photograph. When the object is brought to proximity of the RF-ID reader, the RF-ID reader reads the UID from the tag, and the image, such as a user's face photograph, associated with the UID is retrieved from the database to be displayed on the display device. Thereby, the owner of the object is determined.